Tag: visualization

How do the North American amusement parks compare in popularity? If this question was to come up during a lunch discussion, I bet someone would pull out their smartphone and go to Wikipedia for the answer. But is Wikipedia the definitive answer - how can we tell if Wikipedia is wrong?

Carbon Dioxide ... CO2. Humans breathe out 2.3 pounds of it per day. It's also produced when we burn organic materials & fossil fuels (such as coal, oil, and natural gas). Plants use it for photosynthesis, which in turn produces oxygen. It is also a greenhouse gas, which many claim

If you were a fan of the original Star Trek television series, you probably remember lots of little details about the show. And you might even feel sorry for the people who don't get the clever references you make to things from the show. If you're that person, then you'll

To stack the deck means to cheat or to fix something so a desired outcome is achieved. This term originated in card games, but can also be applied to other things. And here, I apply it (both metaphorically and literally) to creating a better graph! I recently saw the following

An idiom is a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words. For example, "don't cry over spilled milk," or "the cat is out of the bag." Idioms are fun to use, and fun to hear - don't you agree? And

While attending SAS Global Forum, a user asked me about creating a map with a zoomed inset map. This is a topic many users might be interested in, so I decided to create an example and share it. But first, I had to decide which map to use. I thought

In the aftermath of a natural disaster, most people want to help by donating supplies, money, etc. And then it becomes a matter of logistics - getting all those donations to the people who need them. We recently had several days of rain and flooding in North Carolina, and I

Building cars is towards the top of the manufacturing hierarchy - some countries are even known for the cars they build. If you want a good quality car, you probably think of Japan. If you want a stylish sports car, you probably think of Italy. If you want a diesel

In recent versions of SAS/Graph, we have been shipping new/updated maps of each country, with 2 levels of detail (such as state & county, or province & division). But what if you only want a map showing the higher level of detail? In this blog post I share my third

Have you ever seen a map that just didn't look right to you? Perhaps the map area seemed squished or stretched? Perhaps this was because they used a different map projection than you were accustomed to. Or maybe the map coordinates weren't projected at all. In this blog post I

With the advent of things like car GPS & Google Maps, and a steady supply of nice maps from certain news sources (such as the New York Times), people have finally embraced the idea that mapping data can be very useful. And if you are into data visualization, you have

If you're into data visualization, here's something that might interest you - a free eBook showing several ways to use SAS to visually analyze your data. (Did I mention it's FREE?!?!) We've picked juicy chapters from several books and upcoming books (and a few other sources), to show you what

Here in the US, it's the nationwide men's college basketball tournament season! Therefore let's use some data from the previous years' tournaments to sharpen our analytics & visualization skills... But before we get started, I must mention (brag?) that my alma mater, NC State University, won this tournament in 1983.

Hitting the right balance between the agility of self-service business intelligence (BI) and the trustworthiness of governance is difficult. What I often see is that users tend to ignore governance blinded by the aesthetics of self-service visualization tools. As we all know, all that glitters isn’t gold, so how do

The traditional relationship between analytics and creativity might best be described as a state of ‘creative tension’, or perhaps, to put it more crudely, analytics getting in the way of creativity. Steven Hofmans argues that Mad Men need to become Math Men, and this is a journey that is still unfolding.

Are you ready for the supermoon on December 14? This will actually be the 3rd supermoon in 2016! With these big-looking full moons we're having this year, I got to wondering exactly how big is the moon compared to Earth? This seems like a good question to answer with some

The traditional business of a Telecom Operator used to be an extremely profitable one with steady growth rates. But now it has been exposed to a wind of change for some time and looking at the graphics below of predictions for services (based on data from STL Partners analysis) taken from

How often does a graph change the world? In 1854, Doctor John Snow produced a map to plotter cholera cases by drawing on a London map a bar for each reported death. Until then, it was believed that cholera was spread by miasma in the air, however, transmission method has

With the recent vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union being all over the news, I was a bit embarrassed to realize I didn't know exactly what areas are (and aren't) considered part of the UK. After a few Google searches, I found the following map on the

A honey bee can live for 8 years ... but a black garden ant can live even 20 years longer than that! Learn more details, and other interesting trivia, in this blog on "the longevity of things." I recently found The Animal Ageing and Longevity Database, and was fascinated by

With over 1,000,000 words in the English language, why is it that we tend to use the same words over & over? This blog shows a hierarchical approach to help you branch out and choose more descriptive words. But first, to get you into the mood for a blog about

The Rule of Three is a writing principle that suggests that things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things – Wikipedia. 3 Ps of success, Blind Mice, Little Pigs, Stooges, Musketeers, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, rings, pairs

As a linguist, I am fascinated with words, their meanings and use. So when I recently saw the words “learning analytics” in a conference paper title, I started thinking about the prevalence of the word “analytics” itself. In the last decade, we have preceded “analytics” with many modifiers referring to

After doing some recent research with IDC®, I got to thinking again about the reasons that organizations of all sizes in all industries are so slow at adopting analytics as part of their ‘business as usual’ operations. While I have no hard statistics on who is and who isn’t adopting

In 2013, Rick Wicklin blogged about visualizing matrices as heat maps using SAS/IML. That post reminded me that we had done a similar thing for the coefficient matrices in our optimization problems. In particular, we have developed some SAS macros to visualize the input data sets for the OPTLP (linear

What cities have the most and least profitable public transportation services in the US? Perhaps you can find out in this graphical visualization of the data! The US data I'm analyzing here covers things like buses, vans, and rail ... but it might be even more interesting to analyze data from

This blog post describes a neat example of some cool SAS capabilities, and also teaches you a little more about the state where SAS software is made... Here at the SAS headquarters in Cary, NC, the main TV news channel is WRAL TV5. And my favorite segment during the news is Scott

Our recent innovations into Data Visualisation have led us to be inundated and involved in lots of conversations with customers and prospects looking to benefit from the marriage of advanced analytics, visualisation, data management and simplicity. Greg and Minh delved into the benefits that this marriage can yield and why data visualisation should form an

I don’t know about you … but I get hundreds of e-mails a day! Not only e-mail – but text messages, tweets, e-mail advertising, notices from blogs, rss feeds…coming to me at a numbingly fast pace day and night. It’s information overload. It’s also overwhelming. And, on a personal level –